1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to maintenance and debugging of computer software by execution tracing.
2. Description of the Related Art
Program execution tracing has become a valuable tool for troubleshooting run-time software problems and for remote application support. One of the major problems with this approach is keeping the right balance between completeness of the trace information and the performance penalty of the tracing process. Users of such a tool want to gather enough information to allow them to diagnose the problem. However, tracing of each function call, source line, variable and other run-time information can create an undesirable performance impact on the traced program. Extensive tracing can lead to situations where the traced process is slowed below acceptable levels. In real-life deployment scenarios, it is typically desirable to keep performance penalty within a 5-25% range.